Los Angeles: The Chicano Riot

It was supposed to be a quiet rally of Mexican Americans against the war in Viet Nam, but it ended in violence and tragedy. Shortly after noon, some 7,000 Chicanos started marching along Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles to Laguna Park, where the rally was to climax. But so many people jammed into a liquor store next to the park that soon the harassed clerks were unable to wait on them; some of the customers walked out without paying for their bottles. When sheriff's deputies began arresting the casual looters, rocks and bottles were tossed, and the riot was on.

Looting and burning spread over a 20-block area along the boulevard, a main thoroughfare in the barrio where many of Los Angeles' 1,000,000 Mexican Americans live. Tear-gas grenades popped with bursts of eye-searing smoke.

TIME Los Angeles Bureau Chief Don Neff reported: "At places, the four-lane street looked like a battleground, grotesquely littered with the limbless torsos of clothing-store mannequins, smoldering overstuffed chairs and pieces of broken glass. At least five stores were gutted by fire. Scores of shops and businesses had their windows smashed and their shelves cleaned out of merchandise."

Relative calm descended with darkness, but tension remained. Some 1,200 sheriff's deputies were summoned to the area. Burglar alarms echoed into the night, and red-lighted sheriff's cruisers prowled the boulevard, while small knots of angry Mexican Americans gathered along barricades set up at the side streets. More than 70 people were arrested. At least 26 demonstrators and 26 deputies were injured; one man was seriously hurt when he was shot in the head as he tried to drive through a blockade and crashed into a utility pole.

In the Silver Dollar Bar on Whittier Boulevard, deputies found the body of Ruben Salazar, 42, a militant Mexican-American journalist well known in the Chicano community. Salazar, for years a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, joined the Chicano-oriented television station KMEX earlier this year and continued writing a weekly Times column that often bitterly attacked racism among white Angelenos. Many of Los Angeles' Mexican Americans looked to Salazar as their spokesman and interpreter to the Anglos. There is a notable new militancy among Chicanos, inspired by the successes of Cesar Chavez in organizing California's farm workers. Salazar's death, added to that growing hostile spirit, could touch off angry additional waves of Chicano unrest in the East Los Angeles barrio.